Road Trip 2016: Refugees in Germany turn to tech to make a new home

30 September 2016

Transcript

[MUSIC]
Right now, we are at the Lighthouse Welcome Center, which is just kind of on the outskirts of Munich.
This is one of the places where people come when they originally arrive in Munich to kind of get that orientation
I get help with everything.
I'm looking for new life, and I looking for job, study, new family or friend.
What we found is there's a lot of technologies that are helping people adjust to their new life in Germany.
So there's four langauge site to help people learn German.
There's sort of site to help people find things like I used to be like a finding baby's stroller or clothes.
Now it's more like finding services or trying to find an internship, trying to find a job.
Lot's of different things also connect people, so connect as local.
I realized that in late two thousand fifteen that
Even though there were quite a few refugees in Germany by the time, it was really hard to meet one for the German side.
And the other way around, too.
So we figured there must be an efficient way, a technological way to actually help people to meet.
And we decided to put up the website, letsintegrate.de Where you can in three easy clicks set up a meeting between a local and a new comer.
The friendship with Lasse helped me much.
I know many things through Lasse.
Lasse helped me to find the apartment.
[MUSIC]
We've started to meet up with women and children refugees.
There's this group that works with World Vision and what they do is do activities to help the kids adjust to living in Germany.
And you can see how much these
And kids love to share songs.
They have made themselves on their mobile phones with others and through social media.
[MUSIC]
We met with the [UNKNOWN] this morning and what they are doing is they gave free codes to all of these refugees who are coming so that they can learn
German, through an app.
Somebody who just entered a country and needs to survive there, has a dramatically stronger motivation to learn the language.
The rest of the groups we saw were families using the same app or groups of people.
[MUSIC]
My name is Ghaith Zamrik, and I'm from Syria Damascus.
I'm developing an app.
BureauCrazy is a new app that a bunch of refugees are working on.
They went to this school called the ReDI School of digital integration, and basically what it does is it teaches refugees skills to work in tech.
So what they're working on is an app that will kinda guide people through the bureaucratic process in Germany.
It's gonna have all the forms like you might need to fill, or even if you don't know what to do at all, it's just like you ask the question and it tells you what to do, where to go, which papers you need.
[MUSIC]
[UNKNOWN] Be looking at technology and specifically in Germany, seeing how people are using technology to integrate into society here.
You know, ultimately, tech is kinda the connector, but really for a lot of people it still is all about human connection, and tech is just what kind of brings you together.
[MUSIC]